Bitcoin Core has enabled the Taproot upgrade to the Bitcoin protocol. At block 709632, the soft fork was activated.
To take effect, a soft fork just requires a majority of the votes. A hard fork requires the entire network to agree, invalidating prior blocks.
Taproot’s features
The Taproot patch improves the secrecy of multi-signature transactions while also allowing smart contracts to be used on the Bitcoin network.
When compared to Ethereum contracts, Bitcoin smart contracts offer a limited feature set.
After the Segregated Witness (SegWit) upgrade in 2017, the Bitcoin Taproot upgrade is the first soft fork.
The first rumblings of a fresh soft fork emerged from Bitcoin Core developer Gregory Maxwell in January 2018.
Taproot was approved almost unanimously on June 13, 2021, following consensus upgrades in Bitcoin Improvement Proposals BIP340 (Schnorr signatures), BIP341 (SegWit output conditions), and BIP342 (SegWit output conditions).
Signature combination
Schnorr signatures and the Taproot architecture are defined under BIP340. By combining several signatures into one, the three suggestions are supposed to make Bitcoin more private and space-efficient.
Pay-to-Taproot is a sort of payment-enabled by BIP342, which allows users to transact using a Schnorr public key or other methods. It can give users the option of making some transactions private and others public.
If Person A sends Person B 1 BTC but only wants it handed to Person B after a set of criteria is met, all of those circumstances will be available on the public ledger, potentially jeopardizing Persons A and B’s anonymity.
Merkelized Alternative Script Trees (MAST) conceals the smart contract’s terms and compresses the data. MAST returns a merkelized hash of the data.
Schnorr signatures
If many signatories are required for a transaction, each private key owner must calculate their signature and include it in the transaction.
Bitcoin transactions were previously signed using the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm prior to the Taproot upgrade (ECDSA).However, the addition of Schnorr signatures will speed up transaction verification.
Image courtesy of Cointelegraph News/YouTube
Source: https://bitcoinerx.com/blockchain/technical-update-bitcoin-core-activates-taproot-upgrade/
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